Redeeming Justice Read online

  Mom.

  I should’ve called you. I did something stupid. I made a mistake. I went to a party. I need to tell you what happened. I need help.

  I look back at my father’s house, and I imagine him there. He stands outside his front door. He waves frantically, helplessly. I keep looking at him as he gets smaller and smaller, and then I can’t see him anymore.

  * * *

  —

  The police march me into a cell at a holding facility.

  “You’ll be transferred to Cook County Jail, processed, then extradited to Wisconsin,” an officer tells me.

  I hear these words and they stick, as information entering my head always does, but these words don’t seem real. I can’t commit to them. They are words meant for someone else. I want to spit them out, send them back, but then I hear the clang of metal bars closing in on me. I turn in the tight, closet-sized space and see a concrete slab, a mattress as thin as a wafer, no pillow, no sheets, no blanket. I pace, then sit on the concrete slab. I drop into a fetal position. I want to sleep, but I know when I wake up, I will still be here. Knowing that fills me with panic. I bolt upright and get to my feet, and I start to pace again.

  “Hey.”

  An officer stands outside the cell.

  Heavyset, white, his face round and red.

  “We’re transferring you to County,” he says. Then he smiles, his grin dark, judgmental. “Why y’all go up there to Wisconsin and rape that little white girl? They don’t play in Wisconsin. They gonna hang you in Wisconsin.”

  “I didn’t do that,” I say. “I didn’t do anything. She’s lying. She’s making it up.”

  I rush to the bars, grip them with both my hands.

  “Look at me. I’m seventeen years old. I’ve never been in trouble in my life. I’ve never been in jail. I don’t have a record. You’re not going to find my name in your system, because I’ve never done anything.”

  I feel the heat rising. I fear it will burn a hole through my throat.

  “Sir, listen to me. Please. Do you think that for the first time I’d ever get in trouble, I’d drive almost two hours out of state, to Wisconsin, to rape a white girl? You think that’s what I’d pick to do?”

  The officer pauses, studies me. He speaks softer now, his tone gentler. “I’m just saying, man, they don’t play up there. You better get yourself a good lawyer.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, the police drive me to Cook County Jail.

  “For your intake,” a police officer says.

  The word “intake” flitters away. I focus only on “Cook County Jail.”

  If you’re a Black male and live in Chicago, you’ve heard all about Cook County Jail. You know its reputation, and you’ve heard the stories.

  Cook County Jail—a monolith sprawling over nearly one hundred acres—is the largest jail in the United States, housing ten thousand inmates, double its capacity, 75 percent of whom are Black. What happens at Cook County stays at Cook County, but the rumors have spread throughout the South Side—guards brutally beating inmates, random, middle-of-the-night, vicious strip searches, stabbings and fistfights, filthy conditions, rats biting prisoners while they sleep.

  These images dance through my mind, visuals I try to blink away as the police lead me inside, to Unit 11, a maximum-security unit for people facing murder and rape charges. I walk in, handcuffed, barely moving, my head lowered, downcast, trying to avoid eye contact, relying on my peripheral vision to see my way, my mind flailing to grasp this reality—that I am actually here, in this place, this cold, dirty-walled cellblock, or pod, crammed shoulder to shoulder with humanity. Fifty men glaring at me in a space fit for twelve, sizing me up, all of them older, hardened, some of them already sentenced to life in prison. They pelt the air with questions.

  Who are you?

  What did you do?

  How old are you? Shouldn’t you be in juvie?

  I answer with silent questions of my own.

  Why has this happened?

  Where am I?

  Where is God?

  Who am I?

  * * *

  —

  They herd us toward a detention cell. A bullpen. As we walk, a guy in his twenties, nervous, fidgety, whispers to me, “Your first time in here?”

  I nod. I can’t seem to find my voice.

  “Me, too. Man, they got me for driving with a suspended license. I’m in for a traffic ticket. You believe that?”

  He ducks his head, looks quickly left, then right, as if searching for an escape route. “I shouldn’t be in here,” he says.

  “Hold up,” a guard shouts.

  We all stop.

  “Line up against the wall,” the guard says.

  We have very little room to maneuver, but I do my best to squeeze in toward the wall.

  “You know the drill,” the guard says.

  “What drill?” the guy who spoke to me asks, standing two people away.

  “Everybody get naked,” the guard shouts.

  I keep my eyes front as I hear grunting, belts being unbuckled, clothes being removed, shoes pulled off. Slowly, flushing with embarrassment, I undo my belt, step out of my shoes.

  “Kick your clothes away,” the guard says, then shouts, “You!”

  I look to my right and see everyone standing naked, except for the guy who spoke to me. He wears his undershorts.

  The guard screams, “I said, get naked!”

  He picks up someone’s work boot and guns it at the guy. The boot smashes the guy in the head. His head jerks back, hits the wall.

  The guard screams, “Didn’t I say get naked?”

  I hear the guy whimpering, see him getting to his feet, fumbling to remove his undershorts. I look straight ahead, don’t move an inch. We stand here in a line, naked, vulnerable. I feel dehumanized. Then the guard tells us to lift our genitals as ten or so officers advance to inspect us. The lead guard tells us to turn around, bend over, and cough, and the guards shove rubber fingers inside us.

  “Clean, no weapons,” someone says, a voice muffled in a chorus of coughs. The guard tells us to turn back around and pick up our official Cook County Jail uniforms.

  “Don’t put your clothes on yet,” the guard shouts. “Go this way.”

  Holding our balled-up clothes to our chests, we walk zombielike into another room. We stand clustered together, as motionless as we can. A new emotion passes through the room—dread, and for me the added terror of not knowing.

  “Oh, no,” someone says, as a man in a blue smock comes into the room. Not a guard, I think, and then the same guy whispers urgently to the room, “The dick doctor.”

  “Looking for STDs,” someone says to the guy who’d been hit by the boot. “Infections.”

  I don’t like how this sounds. I want someone to fill me in, but the dick doctor approaches me first. He holds a Q-tip.

  I’m not sure what he’s about to do, but as a reflex I bite my lip a second before he sticks the Q-tip into my penis.

  I gasp and tears come, and then he withdraws the Q-tip, which hurts worse. An electric shock of pain pulses through me.

  I don’t remember how I arrive at the next phase of the intake, but I am in a room with several showers and I wander under one. A trickle of ice water squirts down my back. I shout and whip around, and someone trains a hose on me, dousing me with disinfectant. I back up beneath the shower, the frigid drip biting into my skin.

  * * *

  —

  Six hours later, I get dressed in my Cook County Jail uniform, and two guards escort me down a hallway, past a rumbling soundtrack of jail bars clanging, shouts, screams, hoots, and guffaws of voices from countless invisible men. I feel out of my body, as if I were not really here. It’s as if I were watching a black-and-white documentary of this scared,
clueless kid walking inside some dreamlike prison camp. Or worse. I’m not comparing myself to my ancestors, but I capture a snapshot of them in my mind, imagining for one small second, what it must have felt like in the bowels of a slave ship.

  * * *

  —

  A guard hands me a cup, a small plastic toothbrush, a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, and a tiny bar of soap, then closes me in a cell with another man, an older, heavyset Latino who speaks no English. I sit down on the slab that is my bed. My heart feels as if it were rocking in my chest. I’ve read about people having panic attacks, and I wonder if that’s what’s happening to me. I exhale, close my eyes, bend over, and try to catch my breath. Breathe, I tell myself. Jarrett, breathe.

  Staring at the floor of my cell, I realize I’ve lost track of time. I lift my head and look over at my cellmate, the older Latino man. We make eye contact. He nods. I nod back. I wonder who he is and why he’s in here. I’m sure he wonders the same of me. I take another deep breath, attempting to calm myself, and I close my eyes. A moment later, I hear a noise, paper crinkling. I open my eyes, and the Latino man is standing next to me. He holds a sandwich in a paper wrapper—bologna, lettuce, tomato. My mouth waters. I’m famished. I haven’t eaten since—I can’t remember when. My cellmate pulls the sandwich apart and offers me half. I look at him, fight back the tears that fill my eyes. I take the half sandwich he offers and I say, “Gracias.”

  “De nada,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Every hour a fight breaks out. Rival gangs go at it. Guys brutalize each other in the TV room, slashing each other with hidden shivs, throwing chairs, slamming heads onto the floor. Bloody ambushes are carried out in the shower. The bank of pay phones becomes a battlefield. Prisoners rush the phones to make a call. Other prisoners attack, fight them off, fists fly, pounding heads, breaking noses, fingers turning into claws, ripping faces, gouging eyes. For these first two days, I stay as far away as I can, leaving my cell only when a guard forces me to.

  I count a number of people locked up in here who are dope fiends or certifiable, or both. People shriek at each other, at themselves, at the ceiling, at horrors only they can see. Inmates strip naked and curl into fetal positions on their cots, howling, crying. One guy, coming off a bad drug trip, claws at his forearm, tearing at it, peeling off the skin. At night, in the darkness, sound itself becomes both brutal and horrifyingly beautiful. Inmates shout, swear, sing, rap, attack the bars of their cells with cups, fists, bodies. I feel as if I’ve gone from high school to hell.

  Miraculously, nobody bothers me. I speak to no one, keep to myself. More than once an inmate asks, “How old are you?” When I say, “Seventeen,” I mostly get looks of surprise. “You’re in the wrong place,” people say. “You shouldn’t be in here. This is no place for a kid.” Looking so young, I think, keeps me out of danger.

  We shower irregularly. Once or twice a week, I’m told, but I’m not sure that’s the exact number. I know I missed the day the guards handed out towels, so even if I got to shower, I wouldn’t know how to dry off. Forty-eight hours in here and I feel dirty, light-years away from normal hygiene, the daily rituals we take for granted—showering, washing up, shaving. Those feel like luxuries I have lost, belonging to somebody else in a different world. Taking a long, hot shower anytime I want? I would give anything for that right now.

  Mostly, I sit in my cell and wait—in silence, trying to sort out my thoughts. I’ve stopped praying, stopped asking God why. I know I won’t get an answer. I feel too confused, my mind having dissolved into a state of shock. On occasion, though, I hear my cellmate, the older Latino man, murmuring Spanish that I believe may be his prayers. If ever there were a time that I should pray, now would be that time. But I can’t. I just can’t. Other than that question—Why?—I have no idea what I would ask God, what my prayer would be.

  I know, too, that I should call my mother, but I can’t do that either. I tell myself that I don’t call because I want to protect her. She’s so fragile I fear she’ll fall apart when she finds out I’m in here. I honestly believe she could have a nervous breakdown. I want to spare her feelings. I try to convince myself of this. I almost succeed. The real reason I don’t call her is because I am filled with shame. What would I say to her? How would I explain this? I can only imagine how disappointed she’ll be, how devastated.

  I sit in this cell, frozen, immobile as a statue. My spirit feels gutted. This must be what depression feels like, I think. I always thought depression was a mental state. I never knew that it was also physical, a kind of weight crushing through you, laying you out, splintering your will. I can’t eat, I don’t sleep, I can barely move.

  On my third night in Cook County, after lockdown, a sheriff’s officer rattles my cell. Lying in his bed, my cellmate awakes, grunts.

  “Adams,” the officer says.

  I lift myself out of my bed.

  “Yes?”

  “Go call your mother.”

  He opens the cell, pulls me out, closes the door behind me.

  “Your mother and your aunts have been calling here nonstop for three straight days. They think something happened to you. They called the sheriff. Get on the phone and talk to them.”

  He leads me to the phone bank, to the battlefield. But this time of night, I am alone. I look at the phone, then back at the officer. I don’t move.

  “Call your mother,” he says, handing me the phone.

  My hands shake as I dial my mother. She answers.

  “Mom,” I say, collapsing onto the concrete floor.

  “Wait, wait, wait, I’m going to patch in your aunties.”

  A few seconds pass, and then I hear Sugar, Honey, and my mother, talking over each other until my mother takes the lead.

  “Your father called me,” she says, breathlessly.

  I can hear the tears in her voice.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her question comes out as a plea.

  My lip quivers.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “What’s going on?” Sugar says. “Why are you in there?”

  “I can’t—”

  I swallow; then I speak in halting sentences.

  “I don’t have all the facts,” I say. “I can’t explain everything. I go to court in a few days and I’ll know more—”

  “Court? For what?”

  My mother’s voice rises higher than I’ve ever heard. It sounds like a shriek.

  “I’m being charged from a case out of Wisconsin.”

  I exhale and then I speak rapidly.

  “We went to a party there, me, Rovaughn, and Dimitri, and this girl up there, this white girl, you know, she accused me—us—of rape.”

  My mother starts to cry.

  “Rape,” she says. “No.”

  “Mom, I didn’t, I would never—”

  Her voice stiffens, goes eerily calm. “When were you in Wisconsin?”

  “It was back in the summer. We drove up there.”

  “I never knew.”

  “I know. I never told you.”

  Sitting on the floor, I hug my knees to my chest. Tears start filling my eyes, but I cough, fight them off. I will not cry on the phone with my mother. That will break her. That will destroy her.

  “A lawyer,” someone says, Sugar or Honey, I can’t tell.

  “We can’t afford a lawyer,” my mother says, her voice thin, distant.

  “I know,” I say. “But I didn’t do anything. I swear. This whole thing is made up. This girl is lying. If I tell the truth, I’ll be all right.”

  “I never knew you went out like that, without telling me,” my mother says. “I’m—surprised.”

  She means “hurt.” I hear the ache in her voice.

  “To Wisconsin,” she says, a finality to her tone.

 
; “Jarrett,” one of my aunts says, “God has a reason.”

  I pull myself off the floor.

  “I know,” I say, “but for the life of me, I can’t think of one single reason right now.”

  “You pray and you keep praying.”

  “I will.”

  “You have to.”

  Then nobody speaks. For a few seconds, I hear only their breathing, their sighs, their tears.

  “I don’t know if I can come down there. I don’t know if I can see you there,” my mother says.

  She sounds so brittle, so sad.

  “You shouldn’t come down here,” I say. “I’ll call you. I’ll keep you informed. I promise.”

  “I don’t want to see you like that,” my mother says, and she begins to sob.

  “I know, I know.” I look at the officer, who has turned away from me, giving me this time, all the time I need.

  “I have to go,” I say. “The officer says I have to get off the phone.”

  “Call us,” Honey says.

  “You keep praying,” Sugar says.

  “I will,” I say, but I honestly don’t know if I will, or can.

  Then I hear a muffled sound I know. My mother’s crying has gone into another gear. I can picture her sobbing, swaying. I can’t stand seeing her like this, even in my imagination.

  “Mom,” I say. “I love you. Don’t worry. We’ll straighten this out.”

  But she’s gone.

  I say goodbye to my aunts and hang up the phone. The officer leads me back to my cell. He opens the door, and I make my way to my bed, feeling disoriented. My arms seem to be swimming through the air as if I were trying to poke my way through a dark maze. I get to my bed and sit down, my breath coming quicker, almost in spasms.

  “Amigo.”

  My cellmate, the older Latino guy, stands a few feet away. He looks at me, his face lined and bruised from age and hardship, but his eyes are clear, kind. He takes a few more steps and hands me a towel.